As any rejected business school applicant will probably tell you, admissions officers sometimes make mistakes. Now, new research from two business school professors attempts to show how those mistakes happen.

Uri Simonsohn, an associate professor of operations and information management at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, and Francesca Gino, an associate professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, analyzed data from 9,000 MBA admissions interviews spanning 10 years. The program that was the subject of the research is at “a large state school,” according to Simonsohn.